21 mars 2003

come on, i know that this blog's go to be more personnal oriented and all. but these last weeks had been such boring for me that i cannot imagine speaking about it to you, thousands of readers. :)

Warren Ellis, some disturbed guy, wrote.
in fact, he does many things, but cannot stop to write. tons of words, billions of sentences, posting them to its mailing list or sending them to the artists he work with, for licensing some of the best comics worlwide, through many publishers.
what did i say ? oh, yeah, Warren wrote this (all above text was sent on Warren' Badsignal mailing list - badsignal-subscribe@lists.flirble.org - that i recommend to all of you) :

"French people, please stop emailing to guess what French Film Thing is. I'm not going to tell you, because it still may not happen. I'll update this at the end of the month.".

the man don't wanna talk about his Albator movie project, produced by Jean-Pierre Dionnet and done by Oliver Dahan ?
heck, with all this noise around this project, i really hope it will works. and that Olivier Dahan will really do a REAL movie, this time. don't fuck with Warren, Olivier...

"No, I'm not getting hate mail from America about working with French people.
And I wouldn't care if I did.".

tell me that Warren' readers ain' t this stupid, uh ?

"However, I have had comments relayed back to me about Reload #1, one person reporting that his retailer, upon selling him the book, commented that if I were in America I'd be deservedly hanged for writing that book.".

... damn...

"I've signed a deal with Sci-Fi Channel to develop a concept I created for a TV movie and possible back-door pilot. They came to me to talk about creating something in the mode of the currently popular comic-book licenses. What I gave them back was something action-based but more grounded and science-fictional; more in common with Sturgeon, Pohl, Zelazny and Silverberg than Spider- Man. And they bought it anyway, bless them. It's called SUPERHUMAN, and it's about the confluence of physical change and transhuman technological approach bringing on superhumanity. Right now, I'm the originator and a producer. None of the next steps are set in stone right now, and obviously there are no guarantees past my authorship of the development document. But, yeah. I'm being paid to create and develop a movie for Sci-Fi Channel. The deal was brokered by manager Aaron Michiel and agent Angela Cheng Caplan with Carel Cutler at Writers And Artists. And I owe Larry Young a beer. That's all I'm saying for now.".

if you told me this a few years ago, i'd probably said something like "shut up you funny liar". but Ellis is going more than a Media Engine #<5000, by now...

on a heavier topic, he also wrote this :

"I remember when Gulf War One kicked off. We'd all been waiting for it for days. That night, I was down at the local all-night burger place, writing LAZARUS CHURCHYARD; working longhand in a notebook in those days, sketching out the pages so I didn't ask for anything impossible to draw in the scripts. Sammy, the owner, would tell my friends that I'd been in there until 4am, "making his little drawings and taking tablets with his Coke." The little TV was on in there, but he wasn't turning down the radio or the bloody fruit machines.

I looked up, and the balloon went up and the cruise missiles banged off and we'd gotten our war on. I stood at the counter, watching a war start on TV, with a fruit-machine background of bingbingbingbing bloopbloop chakkachakkachakka you're a winner!

After about forty-five minutes, the initial bombardment paused, and I ran home. My housemate was waiting at the stairs. We both yelled at each other, "It's started!" Stayed up til dawn watching the first war to be fully televised.

Last night, I had the BBC News 24 videostream open on the right hand side of my screen while I wrote in the left, AOL open in the bottom quarter of the screen so I could trade email with Fraction and Peter Rose, both channel-surfing in the States. And we thought watching the first one on TV was creepy.

There's a webcam in Baghdad, but it's down.

The crump of bombing distorted out of my speakers, as I looked down on Baghdad at dawn through the BBC camera. They had a reporter on the phone in central Baghdad, and he couldn't keep the surprise out of his voice: I'm in the centre of the city and they're not bombing me. Anti-aircraft fire cracked over his voice.

Imagine being in one of those houses. With your family. You never got to dissent. This war's got nothing to do with you. You can hear the sound of the world's big dog scratching and booming outside your door, and you never did anything wrong but to be born there.

Regime change could have been effected twelve years ago and very few people would have argued the toss, the tangle of America's fickle affections aside. In a different phase of American geopolitical manipulation, Saddam Hussein was the lesser of two evils, and no-one wanted to see crazy Iran win a Middle East war. That Saddam is a little bastard is almost irrelevant now. The real needs of this war have little to do with Saddam being a basket case who shouldn't be allowed to run a bath, let alone a country. The instances where there were actual justification for going in, taking him and putting him in front of a court are long gone.

There were other ways. There were always other ways. And now we, able to dissent, made complicit by democracy, will wear the stink of a para-legal war of oil and Robespierrean guillotine politics for a long time."